A Native American man and his friends have been abducted by human devouring aliens! Now its up to you to help him destroy the alien mothership, save his friends, and save Earth before it's too late.

Well after spending years in development hell, Prey turned out to be a pretty good game. If this was just a shooter concerned with blasting aliens, that wouldn't be the case. Luckily Prey incorporates some rather innovative (for its time) concepts. You've got blue and orange portals (predating Portal), reverse gravity effects aplenty, and even spherical levels (predating Super Mario Galaxy), and even Astral Projection aspects. You've even got spaceship flying sections as well, where you dogfight enemy drones. These elements are mixed up in some surprisingly clever puzzle designs at times.

It turns out that kind of stuff is far and away the best part of Prey though, because its actual shooting aliens bits get stale fast. The weapons available aren't all that interesting, and most of the environments are small and corridor fashioned in nature, making combat a very straight forward affair. To alleviate some potential boredom, Prey does keep a pretty keen sense of humor going. But Prey also has a dark side to it, women and children are murdered before your eyes in this game for example. Graphically Prey looks very nice even nine years later, thanks to the id Tech 4 engine and excellent art direction. There's some great licensed music in Prey as well. Hearing Judas Priest and Blue Oyster Cult in an FPS like this was not expected.

All the same you'll likely be ready for Prey to be over before it is. For every five minutes of awesome environmental puzzles, you have to mindlessly blast through thirty minutes of rote alien slaying. The story starts off kind of lame, gets a little more interesting, then ends on a cliff hanger we will likely never see rectified. Yet the amazing graphics and gravity/portal technical wizardry make Prey an FPS worth experiencing. Perhaps Prey's greatest achievement though, is making its protagonist a Native American who is not only a strong lead, but not negatively stereotyped in any way. Now there's an innovative idea for a game to be remembered for.

What's even more weird is that Dragon Ball Xenoverse found a way to fix the problem that the Dragon Ball video game series (and anime based games in general) have been dealing with for years now: How to have a story mode in a game based on a property where everyone is sick and tired of the story?

The game in a nutshell is that important events in the history of Dragonball Z have been horribly altered and time is falling apart. There are a lot of really neat 'what-if' vignettes that give your player created character a chance to save the day by fighting alongside the DBZ cast in order to put time back the way it should be. This concept is backed up by a pretty decent fighting engine that (while shallow) is dynamic and does a great job of letting you feel like you're a fighter in the DBZ show.

This is a fun little puzzler that takes inspiration from chemistry, though it does simplify some things (you can actually generate a couple of isomers that don't work in real life). It's like sokobon in that you have one thing you move around, but rather than focusing entirely on pushing you have to mix pushing and pulling as when you encounter another atom you form a bond. It starts off simple, then adds in things such as rotation points, bond increasers (so you move over them and a single turns into a double, then a triple and a quadruple (another impossible thing in real life)) and bond splitters. And as you get further it combines those three, and a final thing they add is needing to create multiple molecules.

No chemistry knowledge is needed, though it does help a few times to figure out what molecule you're trying to build based on the atoms given to you. And after assembling the molecule it lets you know what you build and give you some facts.

Games Beaten: 2015201620172018Blizzard Entertainment Software Developer - All comments and views are my own and not representative of the company.

I think I ultimately liked this sequel as much as the first game. While that one was this wonderful breath of new gameplay and surreal aesthetics, this one saw everything done bigger and...usually better. The strange/surreal plot of the first is more pulpy this time - which doesn't work as well. The music is, somehow, even better than in the first. There are some very cool ideas and levels in this one unlike anything seen in the first. You can't cheese your way through anything with an overpowered mask like you could at times in the first. There's more focus on forcing you to play certain characters, less focus on the mask/loadout idea from the first game (though some of that persists).

To that end, the game seems harder...but I am not certain it is on the whole. Some levels are certainly large and brutal, requiring you to rack up some crazy combos from the very start just to get to weapons/hiding spots/etc. They are curse-inducing and will drive you mad.

All in all the game took me about 12 hours to play through everything, which is 4 hours longer than it took me to beat the first game. It also has about 50% more levels than the first though, so my time is (for me) pretty much on par. I averaged about 20-30 minutes per stage...some I did in 5-10 minutes and a few of the harder ones took me an hour and a half.

Still, I consider this one of the tougher series out there and also one of the most adrenaline-pumping...I thoroughly enjoyed my time with it and will likely give it a go again at some future point (perhaps on the Vita) to see if I can improve some of my level grades. Highly recommended.

Ori and the Blind Forest was one of my most anticipated games of 2015 and it did not disappoint me in the least. It probably would have flown under the radar for me had I not gotten an Xbox One for Christmas and researched Xbox One digital titles (It is also available on PC). I watched a few trailers and was pretty impressed with what I saw. Thus began a long 3 month wait for its release.

Platformers are one of my favorite genres. I've been playing Rayman Legends recently since it is one of the free titles you get with Xbox Live. When I downloaded Ori and the Blind Forest, Rayman took a back seat and I couldn't put OatBF down. It took me just over 9 hours to complete and I did a fair amount of exploring. I think I was 90%+ in exploring Ori's world of Nibel.

OatBF has very little in the way of plot but it makes expert use of what little plot it does have. Parental love and friendship are key themes here and they are used well. I confess that I got a little misty eyed a couple of times. Pretty impressive for a game with so little dialogue. The main characters never say a word but you do have a Navi-like companion that occasionally chimes in to tell you where you should head next.

OatBF has a few RPG elements such as a skill tree which you can use to upgrade your abilities. I was able to complete two of the three trees by the end of the game and I completed about half of the last skill tree. You won't be able to complete all three trees without some serious enemy grinding so be careful with your choices. Personally I made getting Triple Jump and Ultra Defense a priority. Triple jump is just darn useful and Ultra Defense gives you effectively double health against enemies.

Ori's abilities are also very well done. The game does a great job of easing you into her multitude of powers and abilities. The game requires you to make use of all of her abilities if you want to succeed, very similar to Metroid in that regard.

One of my favorite features is the way you save your game. It is a good compromise between the more modern checkpoint save method and the static save point method. You have a resource that lets you use powerful abilities, open special gates, or summon a save point. Later in the game, creating save points can also restore some health so careful management of this resource becomes another strategic element of gameplay. You can save almost anywhere except in areas with environmental traps, most likely to prevent death loops.

Overall I did not find the game to be too difficult. However at the end of each dungeon, there is an extended area where you cannot save and you are typically rushed through the remainder of the dungeon due to some catastrophe. Those areas can be brutally difficult and your only recourse is to perform them over and over until mastered. And while I may have uttered several curse words during these parts, it was very satisfying to complete them. I believe that these difficult areas are there in lieu of boss fights. Ori does have a main antagonist but Ori does not really do much to confront her - Ori primarily evades her instead.

I greatly enjoyed Ori and the Blind Forest. Everything about it was just so well done. The gameplay, the artwork, and the music. So far it is my favorite game of 2015. I give it my highest recommendation.